Thursday, November 17, 2005

NoScript is Biased against Me!

Firefox Ext. NoScript is Biased against Me and Biased Toward Advertiser/Site Trackers

I run Firefox with NoScript which can be found here.

NoScript is aimed at the sophisticated web surfers who don't want foreign scripts and advertisements popping up on their PC. NoScript's approach is to allow you to WHITELIST any domain that you want to allow to run scripts on your browser. That's why I use it. I want the choice. However, NoScript builds in whitelisted ad revenue and tracking sites that can't be removed through it's Firefox Extension interface. These 15 sites include:

  1. flashgot.net

  2. google.com

  3. googlesyndication.com

  4. informaction.com

  5. yahoo.com

  6. yimg.com

  7. maone.net

  8. mozilla.org

  9. mozillazine.org

  10. noscript.net

  11. hotmail.com

  12. msn.com

  13. passport.com

  14. passport.net

  15. passportimages.com

I can understand Mozilla.org being in the whitelist by default, after all, NoScript is posted there. But I don't have the choice to remove any of these sites. When you view the NoScript options, it shows these default domains (which I slightly consider evil) grayed-out thereby showing me I can't remove the domains:



My question to the author Giorgio Maone or anyone else who may know, why does the author forced his biased, mandatory whitelist on me? I like the extension and I commend the author for his work. You're a better, more talented programmer than me.


There is good news!
These domains can be manually deleted by opening the path to the NoScript extension folder and editing the javascript configuration files. The path in Windows is:
%appdata%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\[YourProfileName]\extensions\{73a6fe31-595d-460b-a920-fcc0f8843232}

The files to edit are

  • components\noscriptService.js

  • defaults\preferences\noscript.js

Use your favorite text editor, search the file for GOOGLE or any of the items in my list above and you'll see the list of domains whose scripts are forced on my browser against without my choice.

I deleted this list safely, so can you.

Toodles,
Mark Mc

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